The 3rd edition of the Palestinian Independent Film Festival (PIFF) came to a close on Sunday May 10, after three days of simultaneous screenings and events across five locations in Cyprus and Greece: Limassol, Nicosia, Chania, Agios Nikolaos, and Ikaria.

Organized through collaborations with local cultural groups, solidarity initiatives, supporters, and independent spaces, this year’s edition brought together audiences across different cities through a shared film programme centered around Palestinian cinema, collective gathering, and cultural exchange.

This year’s programme was curated around questions of how life continues under conditions designed to exhaust it , how memory, intimacy, pain, movement, care, and resistance are carried forward across generations and geographies. Through both documentary and fiction, the selected films approached Palestine not as a singular narrative, but as a lived and layered experience shaped by fragmentation, displacement, persistence, and imagination.

Over the course of the festival, audiences attended screenings of Yalla Parkour, Upshot, Gaza Bride 17, and All That’s Left of You, a programme that moved between documentary and fiction, intimacy and displacement, memory and everyday persistence.

Alongside the screenings, PIFF Vol.3 included discussions, workshops, social gatherings, print and music events, and locally organized community activities that expanded the festival beyond the cinema space itself. Across the different locations, the programme created opportunities for collective reflection and exchange around cinema, resistance, representation, and cultural organizing.

This year’s edition also connected with broader networks of solidarity through the presence and participation of representatives linked to the Global Sumud Flotilla in both Cyprus and Greece, creating moments of coordination and exchange between cultural initiatives and ongoing transnational solidarity efforts connected to Palestine.

Throughout the festival, many attendees described the programme as emotionally challenging, intimate, and deeply moving, not only because of the realities it confronted, but because of the human textures it revealed within them. For many, the films opened space for a different encounter with the Palestinian experience: one grounded not in abstraction or spectacle, but in everyday life, contradiction, tenderness, grief, longing, and survival. The conversations that followed screenings often extended far beyond the films themselves, unfolding into shared reflections on memory, responsibility, distance, and collective witnessing.

What continues to define PIFF is its decentralized structure. Rather than operating from a single center, the festival unfolds through a network of independent groups, cultural workers, and community spaces who organize simultaneously within their own local contexts while sharing a common programme and framework. This year’s edition was made possible through the collective efforts and collaborations of Synergeio Theatre, Kafenio Prozak, the Social Center- Immigrant Center of Chania, the Solidarity Initiative with Resisting Palestine, the Agios Nikolaos Anti-Racism Festival, the Ikaria Solidarity Committee for Palestine, United for Palestine Nicosia, local volunteers, artists, organizers, and all participating groups and supporters who helped sustain the festival across the different locations.

PIFF extends its gratitude to every organizer, volunteer, filmmaker, guest speaker, artist, venue, and attendee who contributed to this year’s edition and helped sustain these spaces of gathering across borders and distances.

The festival will continue to develop its transnational format in future editions, remaining committed to independent Palestinian cinema and to building collective cultural spaces rooted in solidarity, autonomy, and shared responsibility.